Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Merry Christmas to everyone! I'm up on the Isle of Lewis at the moment, spending Christmas with my sister & family. The main advantage to this is that my nephew is eleven, so I get to play with all the cool presents he gets....the lightsabre is very cool, and I got him a remote control hovercraft. Brilliant stuff! Hope you're all having fun and eating and drinking to excess...

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Was just looking at the new most wanted list of criminal suspects. All the crimes seem to have been in Yorkshire or Greater London, so I guess you're safe John, especially if you stay away from Weegieland. Some of the entries full of typos, e.g.:

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Arnie has terminated Crips founder Stanley 'Tookie' Williams, despite there being some some doubts as to the extent of his culpability for the crimes for which he was convicted, and his apparent reformation in prison.

All the same, you wouldn't have wanted to mess with him in his heyday - if this guy was in a film you'd think it was over the top:

Anyone catch the program about the Muhammad Ali / Smokin' Joe Frazier fight series last night? Think it was called The Fight. Completely gobsmacked by the final showdown - armageddon, basically. (Also not a very flattering portrait of Ali, I thought).

Wednesday, November 30, 2005

I got myself a Freeview box the other day. Now I'm looking for a good arial, because my reception isn't that great. I figured Amazon would be a good place to search for them as they have customer reviews, but Amazon obviously think there's only one reason anyone would want to watch TV...

Friday, November 04, 2005

(forgive the ## prudery but am typing this in an extremely corporate environment). Rome pretty good, Bleak House impressively techno-fied and The Thick of It just superb (tho last night's final episode the weakest of the 2nd series I think).

Monday, October 24, 2005

Friday, October 21, 2005

I'm moving flat. Place I'm in is closing down, so I'm off to see other bits of London. There's a reasonably nice place I saw in Finchley that I'll probably go for. Anyone know what that area is like (I only visited it once)? Is £360 + bills a reasonable rent? They do have wireless broadband...

(Unfortunately, I couldn't find any gratuitous link to throw in here...oh yeah, Age of Empires III demo is out)

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Does anyone know anything about 'serious games' - computer games with real-world, practical applications, such as training etc. Especially keen to hear about anything that doesn't involve training the US millitary to kill people...

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

monkeehub, which is apparently just one guy, did that brilliant "Creep" flash video that I'm sure I linked to many moons ago. Anyway, after you've depressed yourself watching that, you can cheer yourself up again by watching the even more brilliant JCB song which is doing the interweb rounds at the moment. Summer type nostalgically excellent stuff. (Sound obviously required and probably don't even bother if you're on dial-up)

Warhammer 40, 000Paint models. I'm sure there's probably more to it than that, but who knows what exactly? By Grabthar's hammer, by the sons of Worvan, you shall be avenged! Or something.

Global recession and stuff like that...well, I dunno....US national debt is 7.8 trillion at the moment, which might be bad if they ever get called on it, but I can't see that as long as their GDP holds up. In fact, I'm going to stick to my guns on this one and say that they will probably manage OK (though I suppose this kind of depends on the moves of their next president). I'll leave it to the pessimists to post some damning statistics ;-)

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Sunday, June 12, 2005

flipping heck. this tuesday is tuesday 14th and as such the second tuesday of the month. anyone fancy going to that scottish place on trafalgar sq for some porridge and whisky cocktails or whatever they serve? (alternatively there's this pub on charlotte st which is ok...)

Friday, May 27, 2005

Sometimes even I win things....such as an xfm competition to see "Sin City" at The Rex, which is an "exclusive members club with cinema" in Soho. Well, I'd planned to see the film anyway, and oh, might as well admit it, I was also enticed by the phrase "The film is to be introduced by Brittany Murphy and Jessica Alba so you won't want to be late." Hah! Yeah, a video introduction...how cheated do I feel....

Sin City is an adaptation of the comic book (or graphic novel, if you prefer ;) . It's all guns and girls and one-liners in the midst of mayhem. There isn't really a great deal to say about the film, since it's pretty much what you'd expect a (good) comic book adaptation to be: nothing too deep and meaningful, but plenty of action. It also has a weird and wonderful look, which at times leaves you wondering whether it's live action, CGI or animation. Most of the film is monochrome with colour used sparingly (a girl's eyes; blood on a face) which makes for some stunning visuals.

One problem I did have with the film is that I kept expecting the stories to merge at some point and they don't. It's more like "Tales from Sin City" where the viewer is given glimpses of the life of these weird characters.

Not one for the kiddies, it's unashamedly violent and old fashionedly sexist, in a film noir sense. Excellent fun.

Slightly ashamed about finding this funny, but enjoyed the Sun's headline on Friday: Bush Probes Sadam's Pants. Sub-head was something along the lines of 'He's determined to get to the bottom of it'. It has become Viz. (This in response to their picture of Hussein in underwear on the previous day.)

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

- arguments for Scottish independence vs devolution- the open source brewery- the new political landscape- the work-life balance- whether God is a fascist or not and if e=mc2 describes or governs the universe- existentialist teleology

Tuesday, May 03, 2005

Final part of a new yorker 3-parter on global warming. Also, did you see the Tony Blair profile, reprinted in the Observer on Sunday? Like most New Yorker features, about twice as long as it could have been, but quite interesting on the Iraq stuff...

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Google have recently bought keyhole.com - a firm specializing in satellite imaging - and have integrated the images with their own mapping functionality. It's pretty amazing - you can click on the "satellite" link at pretty much any zoom level to see the view from space. Unfortunately only US & Canada are covered in detail so far - it'll be brilliant when you can zoom in on Charlotte St...

Thursday, March 31, 2005

"Matthew J Hogan has just been appointed by the
Bush Government as director of the Fish and
Wildlife Service. Interestingly, Hogan was the
lobbyist for Safari Club International - an elite
club of exotic animal trophy hunters, as well
as a keen exotic hunter himself.

SCI has 40,000 members, and promotes global
competitive trophy hunting, with Grand Slam
and Inner Circle competitions. These include
Africa Big Five (leopard, elephant, lion, rhino,
buffalo), North American Twenty Nine (one of
each species of bear, bison, sheep, moose,
caribou, and deer), Big Cats of the World and
Antlered Game of the Americas. To complete all
29 awards, a hunter must kill 322 separate
species. Enough to populate a large zoo.

(FYI: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is the
agency charged with granting or denying such
trophy import permits.)"

Are we actually living in some deranged, satirical novel? What the hell is going on over there? Is Bush the devil?

I know the world has got more important things to worry about, but product placement is one of those corrosive things that convinces me that we are gradually slipping into ruin. Fifteen years ago the idea of novelists and songwriters being paid to mention brands in their work have been satirical. Now it's seen as the inevitable future of advertising..

Excellent new Granta this quarter (89: The Factory). (Annoyingly www.granta.com is still showing the previous edition) . A good mix of fiction, social history and feature journalism around manufacturing, particularly its decline in UK.

Could be early signs of something analogous to 18th century pastoralism in literature: a celebration and nostalgia for industrialism, in the same way that writers once addressed the agrarian economy (of course, as discussed in Fitzroy, both were shit).

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

Sunday, March 20, 2005

Went to a function at St Mary at Hill yesterday, a Wren church just off East Cheap. Astonishing, beautiful place. Even at weekends there is a sense of some ineffable energy in the City - the 1000 year old streets connecting the most ancient structures with the most modern...

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

blogger *has* been pretty slow the last couple of days. i reckon we should monitor the situation with a view to moving to a different platform at some stage. am going to try and set something up when I get some free time...

My flatmate interviewed the writer Geoff Dyer the other day. This is quite a nice piece by him in an old Granta, about being a dole-bludging, aspirant writer idler in Brixton in the eighties - ending with some reassurance for those of us in the rat race who yearn for a life of chat and books instead.

Friday, March 04, 2005

Real snow in London and one of the fastest ever bus journeys into work this morning - not very much traffic on the roads at all. I assume this means vast swathes of London's drivers decided to take the day off today or were stuck in huge tailbacks somewhere beyond the M25...

A few months back I linked to this Virtual Machine you could run from a USB drive. At the time, I'd intended to try it out as I was expecting to get a 1GB USB drive from work. It mysteriously got lost on its way to me , so I'm still waiting for one. However, I realised that I could just run the thing from my harddisk, so here's a review to let you know what it is, what it's like and what it's used for.

First, from the above link, I just clicked the Download button and then downloaded the .zip file. It's about 87 MB, so not one for those on dial-up! I then unzipped it to a folder on my Desktop, double-clicked the qemu-win.bat file, as the readme.txt had instructed, and pressed Enter to start the boot. If I was on a linux machine, I would run the boot-linux.bat file instead. (screenshot)

It then opened a window that looked like a computer booting Linux. It detected the hardware, and found my network connection. This is the point where I realised that this is *slow*. I guess it's a full machine emulator, but even running on a 3 GHz Hyperthreaded P4, 512 MB RAM, it's pretty sluggish. I did notice that it only saw one of the processors (hyperthreading means the operating system should see two). I guess at least that had the advantage of letting me write this at the same time without slowing my machine completely to a crawl. (screenshot)

When booting was done I was left at the default desktop (screenshot) Notice at the top it says "QEMU - Press Ctrl-Shift to exit grab" This just means you press Ctrl-Shift to return the mouse cursor control to Windows. It's also obvious from the screenshot that they've based this on Damn Small Linux (DSL).

Next, to try out some web browsing (yes, I know the Dillo web browser is already running; I mean on Firefox). I double clicked on Firefox and....well, it just worked...the same as running it in Windows really. These guys have a bit of an intimidating home page, but since they're trying to sell their security stuff I guess that's understandable! (screenshot) I've blotted out the network details, since they're mine, but it's pretty much what any website sees when you visit it. It's worth nothing that Firefox took 30 seconds to start, though it might have been a bit quicker as I'd made an earlier configuration error while messing around which could have slowed it down. More on this later...

OK, it can run off any drive, including USB stick, so it's Portable. It's runs in an emulator, so it's Virtual. What about the Privacy bit? Well, that's the Metropipe Tunneler icon you saw on the Desktop. I double click that, click Start Tunnel and when it says Tunneler Connected I can start (or restart) Firefox. See the difference? (screenshot) I'm now connected with an encrypted connection through Metropipe's servers. No website knows where I'm coming from, and the connection is encrypted right to my Desktop. Very easy.

Well, that's about it. Any changes you make are saved in the folder you run it from, so you can use any computer running either Windows or Linux with a net connection, to get on the net without altering their configuration in any way, and with your own customised one. I think this is a project with a lot of potential. Well worth a shot if you've got around 90 Meg of free disk space...

Pros:Free to download and useEasy to setup (almost no setup really!) and runPrivacy and a virtual machine all in one little useful packageCan run from a folder on a harddisk or off USB stickCan run on any Windows or Linux machine

[OK, the problem mentioned earlier and described below was my own stupid fault. I closed the Tunneler without stopping it. You'd think I could manage an application that has just two buttons...]

(Oh yes, I promised to mention that problem with starting Firefox. It was that I'd run the Tunneler in a previous session and it automatically set it up to use the Tunneler (as a proxy). When I went back in I'd forgotton to turn it off, and it had saved the setting. I now don't seem to be able to make it remember to NOT use a proxy. I can set it and run it, but if I restart Firefox, it's looking to go through the Tunneler again. Odd bug, but nothing major. I could probably fix it if I really looked...)

Friday, February 25, 2005

Yes, an absolute classic. A wide ranging and vibrant discussion in which we managed to cover:

- the scope for technology to solve global warning- Colonising Mars and the likelihood of achieving nuclear fusion- John's OCD, Seamus's mania and my "bog-standard depression"- Status anxiety and life expectancy- merits of service vs industrial vs agrarian economy- The tyranny of all commercial organisations- Buddhism/depression as survival mechanisms for the modern world- House prices in London and Edinburgh- The conditions required for communism to exist

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Bush Determined To Find Warehouse Where Ark Of Covenant Is StoredWASHINGTON, DC—In a surprise press conference Monday, President Bush said he will not rest until the warehouse where the Ark of the Covenant, the vessel holding the original Ten Commandments, is located. "Nazis stole the Ark in 1936, but it was recovered by a single patriot, who braved gunfire, rolling boulders, and venomous snakes," Bush said, addressing the White House press corps. "Sadly, due to bureaucratic rigmarole, this powerful, historic relic was misplaced in a warehouse. Mark my words: We will find that warehouse." Bush added that, after they are strengthened by the power of the Ark, U.S. forces will seek out and destroy the sinister Temple of Doom.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

WordPress - open source blogging software. As used by mySociety - who have, incidentally, recently launched WriteToThem.com, which looks useful - rant to your elected representatives as well as on this blog.

Thursday, February 03, 2005

“United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from Saigon, 83 percent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.”

- Peter Grose, in a page 2 New York Times article titled, ‘U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote,’ September 4, 1967.

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

This is the kind of idiotic rubbish that makes me despair of mainstream politics. It seems that all politicians are happy to agree on something provided it completely misses the point and can be guaranteed to terrify the populace.

I've just seen a bumblebee, and am going to log it at BBC Springwatch. They're trying to monitor whether spring is occuring earlier. A south african friend was telling me the other day that they do a similar, annual bird count, and that this year all the birds had already migrated before the day of the count. Normally there are 1000s.

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

I know everyone here knows about this stuff, but i'm finding the whole thing profoundly fucking depressing at the moment. Think i'm having the "most depressing day of the year" 1 day late. Maybe technology will save us (Bill Gates take on it - he's more concerned with biological terrorism).

Monday, January 24, 2005

US plans 'robot troops' for Iraq. How long before K9 here is caught making Iraqi prisoners get naked with bags on their heads? That "there are plans to replace the computer screen, joysticks and keypad in the remote-control unit with a Gameboy-style controller and virtual-reality goggles" is particularly disconcerting. Although the batteries only last for 4 hours - which is worse than an ipod.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Sometimes the internet is amazing. I stumbled across this site the other day, and looked up my uncle, who died fighting in WWII. This site found him in seconds, told me when he died, where he is buried, and the number of the grave. CWGC.

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

It's me again, the bearer of glad tidings. Look out, next Monday is the most depressing day of the year, according to a part-time tutor at Cardiff Uni (quite a depressing prospect in itself): 'I don't like Monday 24 January'. At least we'll get it out of the way soon!

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

More environmental doom-mongering, this time from the London Review of Books. It's a review of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment study. High(low?)lights include: in the last 200 yrs, CO2 in atmosphere increased by 35% - a third of which in last 40yrs; an area of reflective sea ice 8 times the size of the UK has been lost in the arctic; melting permafrost releases loads of methane - 23 times better at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2; not only melting ice but expanding water (as it warms) will raise sea levels; up to 37% of terrestrial species could be extinct by 2050; British and Canadia carbon emissions have actually gone up since 97 - most of the reductions are down to the switch to natural gas from coal and oil, that was brought about by Thatcher; worst of all (though hopefully dubious) is the (conspiracy) theory that the US doesn't care because it will emerge relatively unscathed compared to much of the world, and this will strengthen its power base even further.

As if that wasn't enough, there's another scary piece about coal, too.

What can you do? Except resolve never to take an unnecessary domestic flight ever again, as I have just done. And read comics.

Sunday, January 16, 2005

Alliance Against Urban 4x4s. If you're feeling adventurous, hector the owners by downloading fake London borough parking tickets from wastemonsters. Reasonable of them to include the 'Urban' in the title, too.

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

Why is it always the 'advent of the internet'? Was just reading yesterday's Grauniad media section, and every third commentator talks about the advent of the web, or digital media, or the net etc. I find this irrationally and disproportionately annoying.

Thursday, January 06, 2005

My sister got the DVD of Heimat for Christmas. I watched a couple of episodes and it is superb stuff. I vaguely remember them showing this on telly 20 years ago (20!). Imagine them showing a 16-hour, partly black and white masterpiece with subititles on British TV these days. I intend to steal it from her when I get the chance.